40% of UK Solar Panels Manufactured by Firms Linked to Chinese Slave Labour

By uwe.roland.gross on May 5, 2021 • ( 0 )

Detainees listening to speeches in a re-education camp in Lop County, Xinjiang, April 2017.

According to the Guardian, silicon sourced from suspected slave labour in Xinjiang was used to manufacture solar panels in 40% of Britain’s solar farms.

Investigation finds up to 40% of UK solar farms were built using panels from leading Chinese companies

Solar projects commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, the government’s Coal Authority, United Utilities and some of the UK’s biggest renewable energy developers are using panels made by Chinese solar companies accused of exploiting forced labour camps in Xinjiang province, a Guardian investigation has found.

Confidential industry data suggests that up to 40% of the UK’s solar farms were built using panels manufactured by China’s biggest solar panel companies, including Jinko Solar, JA Solar and Trina Solar.

These firms have been named in a recent report on the internment of more than 1 million men and women from the Muslim Uyghur community, in what UK MPs on Thursday voted to describe as genocide.

Companies with factories or major suppliers in Xinjiang produce about a third of the polysilicon material used to make the world’s solar panels, according to a detailed report by the USconsultancy Horizon Advisory. China is the world leader in polysilicon production.

The report found that Chinese solar companies had ties to indicators of forced labour in Xinjiang, where Uyghur are interned, via this polysilicon production.

Chris Hewett, chief executive of Solar Energy UK, a lobby group, said: “This is a matter that UK solar energy industry members are treating with the utmost seriousness.” He said making global supply chains “as transparent and sustainable as possible” brought a “significant degree of complexity”.

Hewett said the UK solar industry was working with international trade bodies to develop a “traceability protocol” to safeguard the global supply chain from human rights abuses.

I’m sure the USA is in a similar situation – the allegedly tainted companies which supplied solar panels to Britain also supply solar panels to the USA.

Guardian: 40% of UK Solar Panels Manufactured by Firms Linked to Chinese Slave Labour — Iowa Climate Science Education